Spring 2015

I love to mountain bike in the desert. Every time I put tires to trail in remote, barren lands, I see things. Maybe it’s the heatstroke and dehydration, concussions suffered from innumerable endos, or my habit of sucking fumes from ventilation pipes atop abandoned uranium mines. But I swear that something is out there. […]

Did I pass the turnoff? I glanced at the back of a receipt, marked up with directions to an inconspicuous trailhead, hand-drawn by a guy at the bike shop. Rumors of burgeoning singletrack in Small Town, Washington lured me to make an unplanned detour in the midst of a longer road trip. With no prior […]

For decades I’ve wanted to spend May in the desert. May is magic in the high desert, and all I wanted was just to leave town and follow my nose, travel from one place I hadn’t visited for decades to another, until I got tired of it, or it simply got too hot. William Least […]

Little Cottonwood Canyon harbors the finest collection of granite rock climbing in Utah, and many of the routes are user-friendly, with short approaches and quality moves. The rock is almost as good as Yosemite, and was developed during a similar era, the late 1950s through the ‘80s. Spring and fall, or early mornings are the […]

My fingertips are smooth as glass. It feels weird and I can’t stop rubbing them together. I turn my palms toward my face and inspect them. I imagine my prints have been sanded off, but they are still there. It seems I have not climbed so much that I lost my identity. I look […]

As outdoor enthusiasts we all have that place, that favorite place where we’ve pushed ourselves to the limit and back, the place we could imagine our ashes scattered once our precious, short time is done here. For me, Castle Valley, is that place. It is also a rabbit hole to gauge my climbing potential; […]

Tuesday, May 20, 1980. Warm Springs Rapid on the Yampa River, about four miles above the Yampa’s confluence with the Green River in far western Colorado. We launched a few days before on a river swollen by spring run-off, camping at Teepee and Harding Hole, marveling at the amazing sunsets (Mt. St. Helens, which had […]